Conventional belt-roll fusers include an internal pressure roll (“IPR”), that entrains a fuser belt, and an external pressure roll (“EPR”). A fusing nip is conventionally defined by a region under pressure between the EPR and the IPR. Conventional belt-roll fusers utilize a hard IPR and a soft EPR to form a fusing nip for fusing an image to a substrate that has just received toner from a transfer station. See FIG. 1 for an example of a related art belt-roll fuser architecture.
Conventional belt-roll fusers often have a stripping shoe that is used to load an inner side of the fuser belt to generate an effective fusing nip pressure, and cause the substrate to strip from the fuser belt at a position downstream of the fusing nip in a process direction. The presence of the stripping shoe causes a stripping radius at the position downstream of the fusing nip. The stripping radius is a function of the distance between the stripping shoe and one or more of the IPR and EPR, or, in other words, the roll-to-shoe gap. While the stripping shoe may help generate an effective fusing nip pressure, and cause the substrate to strip from the fuser belt, belt-roll fusers that utilize a conventional stripping shoe still often face image related defects such as, but not limited to, gloss related image quality (“IQ”) defects, stripping performance, and failure to demonstrate process latitude. These issues may be caused by any number of issues, including, but not limited to, a variance in pressure in the fusing nip that results because of the stripping shoe, and/or failure to optimally strip the substrate from the fuser belt at an optimum moment during a printing process regardless of media size, media type, media weight, media thickness, media stiffness, fuser belt size, process speed, process conditions, image preferences etc.